Thursday, September 29, 2011

Zenopus map redux

A few days back I posted a picture of Greyhawk's Green Dragon Inn from the AD&D Coloring Album written by Gary Gygax (published by Troubadour Press, 1979 under license from TSR). This reminded me of a connection to the Blue Book: the map in the Coloring Album (by Greg Irons) is a redrawn version of the map in the Blue Book (possibly by David Sutherland based on a design from Holmes). This was originally brought to my attention in a review of the Album by Kent Kelly on the Acaeum. I've posted about this before on the DF and OD&D74 forums, so to justify revisiting the topic again I've made an improved visual (see above). I scanned the entire oversized map from the Coloring Album, which took three scans that then had to be stitched back together (if you look closely you can see the staples where the map overlaps the center of the book). I then juxtaposed this with the Blue Book map for a side-by-side comparison (click on the map above for a larger view).

The Coloring Album is a strange chimera of two different activities. The first is the coloring book: an illustrated story of adventurers who meet at the Green Dragon Inn in Greyhawk City and begin a quest in "search of a fabulous treasure". The pages alternate telling the story with fantastic full-page scenes of the party encountering various AD&D monsters. The other activity is a board game entitled "Adventure in the Dungeon", also by Gygax. This game is somewhat like Dungeon!, features different characters from the coloring book story, and uses the map pictured above (found in the center of the coloring book). Some of the monsters in each are the same, some are different. The rules for the game are explained in short paragraphs at the bottom of each page that tells the coloring book story.

As you can see above, while the Coloring Album map changes a few features, overall the two maps are very similar in layout. A few of the encounters even have the same monster in the same location:
Room G / 3 - Giant Rats
Room J / 11 - Giant Spider
Room M / 7 - Giant Octopus (but no pirates in the coloring book)